J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes
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There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
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Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
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Well - yes. In modern times, of course.
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I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
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It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.
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The general notions about human understanding...which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture, they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom.
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Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
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In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
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Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
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No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.
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Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists.
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I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men's lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.
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It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.
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Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.
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My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.
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The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
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It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.
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This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.
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Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
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The history of science is rich in example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.
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This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do. . .
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To the confusion of our enemies.
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I never accepted Communist dogma or theory.
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We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.